Installation

In case you use iptables, you will probably want to start pacserve-ports.service too.

Standalone usage

Instead of pacman, use the pacsrv wrapper to perform an update, install packages and so on. It will automatically download all packages from the LAN, if someone hosts them with pacserve there. Otherwise it will just download them from the internet mirrors, as usually. For example:

# pacsrv -Syu
# pacsrv -S openssh

Configure Pacman to use Pacserve

If you are always running the pacserve daemon and want pacman to use it without the wrapper, add the following line below each repository in /etc/pacman.conf:

Alternatively (for official mirrors only), you may insert the Include...-line at the top of the Pacman mirrorlist file or let pacman.conf-insert_pacserve generate a pacman.conf file for you.

Troubleshooting

Problems if using external downloaders in pacman.conf

If you are using an external downloader such as wget, pacsrv may return errors when downloading. To work around these errors, simply quote the url and output formatting strings (%u resp. %o) using single quotes: